Tomorrow's schools after 20 years: can a system of self-managing schools live up to its initial aims?

Abstract

In 1989 the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms brought in self-managing schools as the unit for educational administration. The government’s stated aims included a mix of outcomes and processes, which were to: improve educational opportunities, meet Māori needs more effectively, give local knowledge real responsibility, and encourage flexibility and responsiveness. The system was to be more efficient, and provide greater accountability. After 20 years, progress towards these aims is, at best, mixed. This article provides a broad overview of the frameworks for school self-management over this period, identifying two main phases from 1989 to 2009. The first led schools to develop inward-looking identities. The second introduced a greater emphasis on capability development. The ongoing legacy of the initial phase is discussed, since reform phases do not so much replace one another as build on what has already been established. It also discusses the shortcomings of each of these phases in relation to the aims of Tomorrow’s Schools, and the kind of framing school self-management might need if it is to realise the aims of improved educational opportunities, particularly for Māori, given that this was an initial driver for the reforms.

Mission accomplished? School mission statements in NZ and Japan: what they reveal and conceal

“…The Treasury Department's 1987 briefing paper was the initial catalyst, "stressing the public cost and magnitude of the education "enterprise" and OECD suggestions for structural change… (the paper) made it seem that the Ministry had become an expensive and cumbersome Leviathan, unresponsive to the new pluralism, and minority needs" (Crawshaw 2001). Starting with the establishment of the "Tomorrow's Schools" policy in 1989 which made selfmanaging schools the unit of educational administration (Wylie 2009), a market-driven approach to education emerged where social and educational policies are collapsed into economic and industrial ones (Ball 2008). Following decentralization, work began on a framework for a revised school curriculum culminating in the introduction of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework in 1993 and the adoption of a revised national curriculum in 2007 (fully implemented in 2010) described by McGee (1997) as one of the most comprehensive revisions in New Zealand's state education history.…”

The enactment of social justice in HPE practice: how context(s) comes to matter

“…According to the vision, the two documents will help schools give effect to the partnership that is at the core of the nation's founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi (Ministry of Education, 2007). Despite these social justice approaches, the inequalities for children from low-income homes have increased, particularly for Māori children have increased (Wylie, 2009) and indeed, New Zealand is a society that has one of the largest disparities between rich and poor of all OECD countries (Keely, 2015).…”

Collaboration and Virtual Learning in New Zealand Rural Primary Schools: A Review of the Literature

“…Bureaucracy was not reduced as intended, but shifted to the individual school environment, where more compliance issues were created through interactions with and accountability to several new government agencies. Principals' workloads grew tremendously through the introduction of Tomorrow's Schools (Earl Rinehart, 2017;Wylie, 2013); and with the introduction of the new curriculum and assessment regimes in the late 1990s, teachers' workloads also became large and unmanageable (Wylie, 2013). Competition between schools inhibited collaboration and created a stratified education system of winner and loser schools (Langley, 2009;Wylie, 2012), with low decile schools, rural schools and schools with a high number of Maori students finding it difficult to attract and retain principals (Wylie, 2012).…”